SWAMP SKETCHES. 56 



of night which haunts remote, uninhabited 

 regions. No phrasing may suggest more 

 than a shadow of such a scene, Some large 

 white birds, snowy herons I supposed, 

 startled by my approach, had risen into the 

 air out of a patch of saw-grass and were flap- 

 ping aimlessly hither and thither, now in the 

 light, now in the shadows, as silent as the 

 brooding silence itself. If I had been the 

 only man in the world, I could not have real- 

 ized more fully the meaning of the word soli- 

 tude. I knew what the swamps of the coal- 

 age of geology looked like; indeed for the 

 time I was back in the days when the groves 

 of lepidodendron and the thickets of giant 

 cane were slowly sinking into the ' ' carbon- 

 iferous seas." Below me were vast forests 

 buried in the mud and sand, and still the pro- 

 cess was going on. 



I have often mentioned the peculiar effect 

 of the plashing sound made by a fish leaping 

 out of still water in the dead of night. A 

 large bass, at least I thought it was from its 

 motion, sprang up in the midst of a dreamy 

 spot of moonlight where the water was deep, 

 and, fairly somer-saulting, fell with a plunge 

 back into the ripple he had made. 



On the side of the lake over against where 

 I sat, a group of immense cypress knees 

 looked like a castle with towers reduplicated 

 in the water underneath them. Farther 

 away fantastic clouds of fog bleached by the 

 moonlight drifted against a black wall, like 

 that of Babylon, upon which stood giant 

 sentinels with spears and shields and gro- 

 tesque helmets. 



Higher climbed the moon, a wan, lop-sided 

 disk of silver, and the scene changed slowly 

 until the lake was shimmering like quick- 



